The present invention relates to a cell culturing apparatus and cell culturing method for culturing zooblast or animal cells, microorganism and fungus, and plant structural pieces.
Generally, for the above cell cultivations, culture medium is supplied to a culturing container such as a roller bottle and a tray etc., and cells are inoculated thereon. Thereafter, such culturing container is placed in a culturing rack at a constant temperature for a predetermined period of time for promoting the cell cultivation. Upon completion of the cultivation, the culturing container is discharged from the culturing rack, for collecting cultured cells and their metabolic substance.
A system for automatically handling the culturing containers has been proposed in commonly assigned U.S. application Ser. No. 099,341 filed on Sept. 21, 1987 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,761,936 or European Patent Application No. 87113905.1 filed Sept. 23, 1987. In this handling system, the filling and exchange of culture medium and cells relative to the culturing containers are automatically performed.
In this proposal, automatic filling of the cells and culture medium into the culturing containers and automatic discharge of these from the containers are attainable, and therefore, container handling efficiency can be improved. However, after the container handling operation, it is necessary to transfer the processed containers into the culturing racks, and prior to the container handling operation, it is necessary to transfer the containers after culturing from the racks to the handling system. For this, personnel manually insert the containers into the racks for culturing, and manually discharge the containers from the rack after culturing and manually insert the same into the handling system.
In this case, since an interior space of a culturing chamber has a temperature about 37.degree. C. which temperature is higher than bodily temperature, such manual labors may cause pain to the personnel. As a result, such manual operations may reduce resultant container handling and transferring efficiency, and overall processes may become costly. Further, there is a fear by the individual personnel of contamination by various bacilli if they work in the culturing chamber for a long time. Therefore, there exists a large demand for conducting the entire processing automatically so preventing personnel from entering the culturing chamber.